A family of codes with variable locality and availability

Abstract

In this work we present a class of locally recoverable codes, i.e. codes where an erasure at a position $P$ of a codeword may be recovered from the knowledge of the entries in the positions of a recovery set $R_P$. The codes in the class that we define have availability, meaning that for each position $P$ there are several distinct recovery sets. Also, the entry at position $P$ may be recovered even in the presence of erasures in some of the positions of the recovery sets, and the number of supported erasures may vary among the various recovery sets.